WHY WE SHOULD PUT
OLIVIA EDMONDS TELLS ALL O
Undoubtedly, waking up with the feeling that you have had only just placed your head on the pillow, is a decidedly unsatisfying start to the morning. Admittedly, we could blame the blue light that we pour into our suffering retinas long into the night. Or perhaps the hideously longwinded academic readings, or even the fact that midnight snacks are increasingly becoming 3 am snacks—but I’m not playing a blame game here. The point is we’re all tired. You got less than 8 hours? Incredible news. Too many times have friends replied to a simple ‘how are you?,’ with an excessively detailed analysis of their sleeping habits. No, I don’t want to see your Fitbit review of last night’s REM sleep. No, I don’t want to hear about your whacky nightmare that actually isn’t scary in the least (call me only when you have a dream as intricate as the plot of Money Heist). No I definitely don’t want to hear your plans to cut caffeine out of your diet to aid your dismal sleeping habits—as a law student I consider this is sacrilege to the highest degree (mainly because the superiority complex of non-coffee drinkers drives everyone around them insane, WE GET IT YOU’RE NOT AN ADDICT LIKE THE REST OF US—but that’s a whole other kettle of fish).
Instead, I offer my exhausted companions some simple advice—take a nap. To which I am often met with some frankly offensive responses, such as: “I’m not an old lady!”, “naps only make me feel worse”, and something along the lines of “oh-my-god-c’mon-my-life-isn’t-fallingapart-that-much-that-I-need-a-nap-to-justget-me-through-the-day-wow.” This ‘nap-shame’ is increasingly common and discriminatory towards the regular napping community. So I must say this to all you nap chastisers. If you don’t like naps you’re not doing it well enough. Like anything, you can’t become an expert without real practice, so start logging those 10,000 hours people. According to real life actual science, the ideal nap time is 20 minutes. This keeps you in a light sleep phase, meaning you avoid the disorientation of waking up from the midst of deep sleep. To those of you who associate napping with the laziest or most geriatric of society, let it be known that some of the greatest minds in the world are proud Nappers. Albert Einstein himself engaged in organised ‘micro napping’ to help keep his brain sharp throughout the day. Winston Churchill avoided the 2pm post lunch blues by actually having a nap scheduled into his busy days. Even Napoleon napped whilst sitting on his horse between battles. To all you judgmental napnaysayers; who’s lazy now? Huge corporations such as Google and Nike have caught on to the business benefits of encouraging employee naps and the correlation it has to productivity. Not to mention that napping literally saves lives everyday. Can you
